Restoring it
Everything else on this site is machinery in service of this. It is worth saying plainly what the machinery is for, because a movement that forgets its purpose keeps its tools and loses the point.
Why new occupants are not enough
Replace every member and leave the arrangement in place, and the arrangement produces the same behaviour from the new people within a term or two. That is not cynicism about the new people; it is what an incentive structure does. The seats matter, and they are necessary — see Replacing Captured Incumbents — but they are the first half of the job.
The second half is removing the thing that shaped the behaviour:
- The statutes that made the capture legal — Problem Laws.
- The language that closes the gap, as actual bill text — Fixing the Law and Fix Bills.
- A record of who blocked the repair, because obstruction is a decision and belongs beside the votes — Good Laws.
The four things that have to be true afterwards
- A citizen can check any claim without permission — the code and the record are public and cloneable. Open Data, Repos.
- What is published about a person is true and computed in the open — awards derived from the official record, with the arithmetic shown and the gaps named. Politicians.
- Better candidates are chosen on merit, in advance, by the community that votes for them — Meritocracy, Qualifications.
- Honest behaviour stops being the losing strategy. This is the one that actually matters, and the other three exist to produce it.
The citizen side of the same ledger
Restoration is not only something done to Washington. Values is where the ethical standard gets written down in a form that can be applied consistently, and Karma is the record of citizens who did the work — hash-chained, so a name that earned its way in cannot be quietly written back out.
What a citizen does this week
Take Action. Call a representative, add a source to a record, vet a challenger, recruit one, draft a fix bill. Each is logged with a link so somebody else can check it. The scarce resource in this movement is action, not opinion.